Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

An American teenager (Asa Butterfield) visits the ruins of his grandfather’s old boarding school in Wales, destroyed in 1943 by German bombs. That’s when he learns that he can traverse a time loop created by the headmistress (Eva Green) to keep the school’s unusual students alive on the same day forever. Ransom Riggs’ novel, obviously inspired by the Harry Potter books, is a complicated challenge to film, and director Tim Burton and writer Jane Goldman grapple with it fairly well for a while, especially in a sweetly romantic thread between our hero and grandpa’s still-youthful sweetheart (Ella Purnell). But a book built around found photographs becomes a movie built around a visual effects wish list, and the story becomes even more involved and confusing on the screen than it was on the page.